Queer Worldmaking in the “It Gets Better” Campaign

The close reading of user-generated videos associated with the “It Gets Better” campaign allows us the opportunity to identify repeated themes across the contributions. Taking the seemingly vacuous phrase “It Gets Better” as our prompt, we employ textual evidence from the videos to tease out the varied meanings of these three words. In the process, we challenge critics who read “It Gets Better” as a monolithic project trafficking in normalizing dictates with narrow visions of the good life. To the contrary, we find a textual public advocating a host of queer worldmaking activities.